Decentralized resource management for multi-core desktop grids

The majority of CPUs now sold contain multiple computing cores. However, current desktop grid computing systems either ignore the multiplicity of cores, or treat them as distinct, independent machines. The latter approach ignores the resource contention present between cores in a single CPU, while the former approach fails to take advantage of significant computing power. We propose a decentralized resource management framework for exploiting multi-core nodes in peer-to-peer grids. We present two new load-balancing schemes that explicitly account for the resource sharing and contention of multiple cores, and propose a simple simulation model that can represent a continuum of resource sharing among cores of a CPU. We use simulation to confirm that our two algorithms match jobs w ith computing nodes efficiently, and balance load during the lifetime of the computing jobs.